Flood Year
Sara Tracey
dancing girl press, 2009
Sara Tracey is a poet and PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has recently appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, Keep Going, Harpur Palate, Wicked Alice, Lily, Hobble Creek Review, and FRiGG.
This Kind of Luck
I tried to wash the night off my windows,
but stars kept crawling in. Shadows
disengaged from my fingertips,
tiny wings drifting away. Yesterday,
I prayed for rain, got locusts, prayed
for locusts, and turquoise fell from the sky.
I’ll never win the lottery with luck like this,
but still waste money on scratch-off tickets.
I don’t need a nickel to tell me I lost.
All night I’ve played the memory game;
pictures, old letters, notes I wrote so I wouldn’t
repeat myself, but I still can’t say no
to a man in a pickup truck, still want to mend
lives with words like stitches. Ragged incantations.
Only fireflies can light this sky. And still,
I’m waiting, still afraid of the dark.
*
